“It’s a different animal. If I go back and watch something like Star Trek, it’s not that hard to analyze what the appeal was, and even if the show is dated you identify what it was that made it work. The Dark Shadows appeal was a little more abstract,” director Tim Burton told the L.A. Times.

“What I loved about it was the fact that it was a melodramatic soap opera, and, well, that flies in the face of any modern studio’s interests as far as moviemaking,” he added. “But what we’ve gone for is a mixture, and that’s always what I’ve been interested in; I think most of my movies are mixtures of light and dark and serious things and things that have humor in them.”